June News 2020 A very warm and friendly welcome back to you all… after such time being closed and much planning, preparation, adapting and training taking place throughout the month of May we were finally ready and able to re-open our beautiful nursery setting on the 1st June 2020!! Our youngest children upstairs in Blue and Yellow Monkeys have been having lots of extra cuddles with their carers whom have been amazing in supporting all the babies back into the setting. The babies have also been enjoying the calming sensory experience of bubbles and songs, exploring their individual trays of messy resources, developed an interest of food in the home-corner and enjoyed taking part in role play activities around this. They have also been delving into paint exploration which has supported their discussions around, ‘People who Help Us’ for example our carers, the Police, Doctors and Nurses, a very important topic during this time and a fantastic display has been created! Our inquisitive Pink Monkeys have taken a particular interest in mirror exploration this month and have thoroughly enjoyed looking at their reflections and identifying and naming their features such as; eyes, nose, ears, mouth and hair. This was then beautifully extended through colour exploration as further questions and conversation evolved around hair and eye colour and again further developed through a creative activity of making faces with paper plates! Colourful Rainbows have also been created encouraging further colour recognition and lots of time spent safely soaking up the beautiful sunshine in the garden area exploring water and ice play, a great way to keep cool as well as prompting conversations around hot and cold. Our Pre-school children in Red Monkeys arrived at nursery to a change of environment and were welcomed back into two amazing separate play rooms each housing resources and areas to encourage all areas of learning and development and they couldn’t have loved it anymore and adapted extremely well! The youngest of our Pre-school children Chimps have had a very strong interest in books and animals this has been strengthened and developed through creative, imaginative, numeracy and literacy activities. A great example of this is the children choosing to read, ‘By My Side Little Panda’ from this the children discussed the letter ‘P’, searching for other books with the letter ‘P’ in the title, the children have also been incorporating Makaton within this and using varied messy and art resources to create their own Pandas! Meanwhile over in the other room our eldest children in Apes have expressed a very strong interest and passion for imaginative play and food! This has been extended through role play in the home-corner, hosting family dinners, serving each other in our restaurant and café and writing menus! Alongside this the children were extremely busy planning and organising a Birthday party for the Dolls…you could observe the children inviting people through typing out emails and making phone calls! All of these wonderful activities have encouraged the children’s imaginative and social development, language, literacy and writing skills. With many mixed emotions and a huge sense of pride during this time we would like to take this opportunity to say a big thank you to our Monkey Puzzle community for all their support and also commend the hard work and dedication of the whole nursery team whom are all working extremely hard to keep the children and their colleagues safe, whilst providing an outstanding and exciting learning environment for the children to explore and thrive in!
